Friday, August 24, 2012

Use Jidoka to Make Quality in the Workplace Your Objective

If you are the owner of a manufacturing unit then you need to make quality your main objective. This will enable you to make products that your customers will want, thereby increasing your productivity at work tremendously. Jidoka, a Lean management concept, is one of the best ways of making yours a high quality manufacturing unit.
There are a few characteristics of Jidoka that enable it to ensure that quality is maintained:
- The production line can be stopped at any time whenever a problem is detected. This prevents the problem from going from bad to worse.
- Trouble prone areas in the production line ought to be isolated so that the problem can be sorted out easily. This prevents defective goods from moving to the next phase in the production line.
- Investigation of the cause of the problem so that it can be avoided in the future. This prevents you from having to do a lot of firefighting from time to time since the root cause of the problems will be eliminated. This also enables newer and improved systems being put in place.
It is very easy to see how this particular technique can help you implement the principles of Lean management at the workplace. You will be able to maintain a high level of quality, whilst making improvements on a continuous basis once you start to implement this technique in your manufacturing unit.
This technique will only be successful if you empower your employees to stop production lines whenever possible. In addition, you might also need to set up systems whereby the production line stops mechanically whenever a problem is detected. Since this technique requires a high level of involvement from your employees you need to have plenty of internal communication in your organisation regarding quality and related topics.
You will be able to increase your profitability tremendously once you use the principles of Jidoka to reduce costly mistakes at the workplace. Your products will also be in great demand with your customers since they will be able to rely on your products to have uniformly high quality.
It is very important for you to use this and other Lean concepts at your factory because this enables you to retain your competitiveness in a worsening economic scenario. If you focus on high quality at every aspect of your work then your organization will do very well indeed.

No comments:

Post a Comment